


thunder only happens when it's raining

by Seiya234



Series: Transcendence AU [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27411133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiya234/pseuds/Seiya234
Summary: hindsight is 20/20. and the signs were there but no one knew to read them.or  “Dipper, pre-2012, has intermittent visions of the far, far future. He doesn’t understand them and he’s scared.”
Series: Transcendence AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/160475
Comments: 1
Kudos: 67





	thunder only happens when it's raining

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarlightSystem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlightSystem/gifts).



To be honest, by the time the twins were two, Anna slept through any noises that she heard from their baby monitors.

Not that _she_ thought that they really needed them any more but it had taken them such a long time to get the kids on a decent sleep schedule, and they were still having to give a bottle to Mabel to get her to sleep and shit her teeth were going to come out all fucked up and it made Mark feel better and…

Well. Anyway. Being the mother of twins meant as a defense mechanism Anna Pines had trained herself to sleep through any weird bed noises she heard the kids doing at this point in order that _she_ could get some sleep. 

The bloodcurdling scream that came from Dipper’s monitor at two am however? That not only had her awake, but tripping over the blanket in her hurry to get out of bed and into his room, her heart thumping painfully in her chest because what was wrong with him, _what was wrong with him?_

(this wasn’t I woke up and I don’t like it. this wasn’t even I had a nightmare. this was adult fear. Anna couldn’t tell you how she knew that until it was far too late.)

She ran into his room and turned on the light, not even caring about keeping the light low to help ease him back to sleep, she needed to see him, she needed to make sure he was okay.

Outwardly, he was fine, though he all but leapt out of the crib in his attempt to get at her, soft baby fat cheeks glistening with tears. She picked him up, and he nuzzled into her chest. Anna laid her face on Dipper in turn, smelling the sweat of the playground in his hair, the spit on his pajama collar, the playdoh under his nails…everything that made him him.

“Baby, did you have a bad dream?”

“Reh!”

Anna’s brow furrowed. “Are you saying… red?”

“Reh! Reh! Red! Reh!”

That was definitely what Dipper was saying. But what could he have dreamt of that was red that scared him so? A fire truck? Strawberries? Blood?

Wait. Blood? No. No that was ridiculous. He had barely ever seen blood, how would Dipper know what that was?

Anna sighed as she sat down in the rocker with her still crying son. “I told your daddy that Clifford the Big Red Dog was going to scare you. It’s okay. Momma’s got you now.” 

(if Dipper was twelve instead of two, he could have told his mother that he had a dream where he was covered in blood. swimming in blood. drinking blood. drinking and laughing and crying blood and everything, everything was fucking _blood_. 

But Dipper was two and all he knew was he didn’t know what he just dreamt about, just that he didn’t like it.)

—-

“Fuck, kid, you look like Ford at this age.” 

Dipper looked up from the blocks that he was stacking impossibly tall. “Bad word,” he said primly.

The woman in the long purple dress started and looked at him. She looked different than anyone Dipper knew in his life. She had big chunky gold earrings and smelt weird and had a short stick in her hand that gave off smoke like one of the candles Daddy would occasionally light. 

“Kid, you shouldn’t be able to see me.”

“Why not?” Dipper knew that dreams were a time where he could do whatever he wanted.

(”ah, lucid dreaming my boy! a valuable skill,” a grand uncle told him years later, before the world ended)

“Because you don’t have the right eyes,” she said. “Look, I’m going to go and figure this out, you be a good boy now you hear?”

—-

“WELL WELL WELL WELL WELL IF IT ISN’T PINE TREE.”

“You’re a triangle,” Dipper pointed out, slightly disgruntled. He had been having a very good dream, one where he was allowed to eat a second and third slice of cake, and he wanted very much to return back to that.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER? CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE?”

Dipper knew without knowing how that as soon as the weird triangle snapped his fingers something bad and owwy would happen to his mouth. Dipper did not want that to happen. So he looked at the mountain in the distance and _pulled_ stepped back before the triangle got near him. 

The triangle snapped. Then he snapped again. Then his eye got angry looking when Dipper just started eating cake while watching him. 

“SO! YOU THINK YOU’RE CLEVER DON’T YOU?”

Dipper didn’t answer. He wanted to take advantage of eating as much red cake as he could before he had to wake up.

“WELL, I GOT _PLANS_ FOR YOU DIPPER PINES! B͟I͙G̱̖̭̞̩̗̙ ̴͚̹̘͚̝̥P̩̝̞LA̕Ņ͍͇̤̮̘͔̳S͈̜. A STORM IS CO-”

“Are you going to keep shouting or do you want some cake?”

The triangle stopped talking for a second, twirling his cane in thought, and then said, “SURE. I’LL HAVE SOME CAKE. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BURN SOON ANYWAY.”

“You make no sense.”

“I MAKE PLENTY OF SENSE! YOU JUST DON’T KNOW IT YET!”

—-

At the end of every month Dipper and Mabel’s teacher would pack up all the drawings they did in their pre-k class and send it home with them.

Mark was of mixed feelings about this. On one hand he enjoyed his children’s drawings and seeing what was going on in their heads. On the other hand, they insisted on having all of their drawings either pinned on all the walls or saved.

(anna threw a few away once, mabel found them in the trash, and there was no living with the twins for a week after.)

And then there was the subject matter….

For Mabel, everything was on fire. Everything. _Every thing._ She drew an apple tre _e… but on fire._ She drew their visit to their grandparents.. _. on fire._ Their kitchen.. _. on fire._ Mabel and Dipper playing… with a fire in the background.

The teacher _ass_ ured them that was normal, a lecture on fire safety having stuck in Mabel’s mind….

He couldn’t explain Dipper’s drawings to Mark however.

There was blood (it was very definitively not just coloring with only the red crayon.) There were rudimentary organs (and how did Dipper know what the liver looked like? Mark asked and Dipper was uncomfortable and then started to cry and Mark felt like a dick.) There were knives and candles and shapes that made Mark’s head hurt.

Mark knew what the problem was.

He resolved to ask his Dad to stop letting the kids watch Unsolved Mysteries.

(but he knew deep inside that that wasn’t really the reason why.)

—-

“Dipper there’s a lady here.”

Dipper looked up to see the lady in the purple dress again.

“Hello,” he said politely, before going back to building a sand castle with his sister.

“That’s… that’s really your sister.”

“Mmm-hmmm,” Mabel murmured, filling a bucket with wet sand. 

“Huh.” The lady tapped out her weird smoking thing, and brought it to her lips before speaking again. “I should have guessed there would be some bleed over. Any way kid- look, what’s your name?”

“He’s Dipper and I’m MABEL!” Mabel said, pulling Dipper around the neck for a big hug. 

“Huh. And you two are-” her eyes unfocused for a second- “Shermie’s kid’s kids.”

“You know Grandma?!”

Dipper didn’t know until now that a smile could be sad. “Yeah, I sure do. Look, I came here to say that I figured out _your_ -” she pointed at Dipper, “deal.”

Dipper didn’t say anything, because he didn’t understand and he knew Mabel would do it for him.

“What do you mean?”

“Yeah, so, your shit’s fucked darling. Totally ass over teakettle bad. Sorry lovey but, that’s just how it’s going to be. That’s how you can even see me.”

None of this made any sense to Dipper, though he saw Mabel mouthing along to what the lady in purple was saying and saving the Bad words for later. 

There was a moment of silence and then Mabel asked “So.. Things bad?”

“Yes.”

“Why you tell us then?” 

The lady in purple looked at them for a solid minute without saying anything. The stick in her mouth dropped on the ground and she ground her foot over it. 

“I…Fuck, I’m sorry kids. Look, do you want a c[andy cigarette](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCandy_cigarette&t=ZWE5N2I5NWI4ZmViNTllYTk1YzU4N2JkNTAwNjAyMGY0NmVlMjk1OCxyWW91S25PUw%3D%3D&b=t%3AS3ysjbPhz5pOAapDaatLbQ&p=https%3A%2F%2Fseiya234.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F631144683335254016%2Fthunder-only-happens-when-its-raining&m=1&ts=1604629588)?” She proffered two sticks to them and they took them.

(yes she was a stranger. But this was Dipper’s dream and they would always be safe in here, and also…Dipper had the feeling she was and wasn’t a stranger. Not really.)

The weird lady ran her fingers through her hair. 

“Look kids… Christ, I was never good with talking to kids. Barely managed talking to my own, and look how-”

She saw their blank looks, and said “Never you mind that. I guess just… look, not gonna lie Mason-”

“Dipper.”

“-Dipper, things look really, really rough for you going ahead. But-” And now she kneeled down until she was eye level with him, and her hands were on his shoulders, and her nails were digging into his skin and it was uncomfortable but he didn’t let it bother him because he knew, somehow, that this was Important.

“The bad? And trust me, there’s a whole lot of that, but….It’s outweighed by the good, I _promise.”_

She turned to look at Mabel, who was currently eating sand because she could get away with that in dreamland. 

“She’s a lot of your good. But remember to not only rely on her for your good. That’s not fair to her. And that’s not fair to you. Promise… Can you promise me to remember that?”

“I promise.”

The woman in purple looked into his eyes, then grimaced. “No. No. No, you’re going to forget that, you won’t remember, you won’t _listen-”_

Her hands began to hurt.

“I’m- I’m sorry-”

She paused. Her hands released from his shoulders, and instead she grabbed him into a hug.

“Bubbeleh. My love. You never, _never_ have to apologize to me, okay? There’s…. there’s so much that will happen to you but here and now, don’t apologize, okay? It will be okay, okay?”

She was crying and Dipper didn’t understand, and he looked at Mabel and he could tell that she didn’t understand either so all he said was, “Okay,” and let the weird lady who was weird yet kind of like Grandma Shermie hug and cry on him.

—

By the time Dipper was in kindergarten, the dreams had ended.

That was probably for the best. 


End file.
